The alarm clock seems to be quite a popular target for product designers, and I’m sure it must have something to do with mankind’s love/hate relationship with the device that wakes us from our blissful slumbers each morning. Melanie Graf, a Product Design student at Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design in London has added yet another creative twist with her Pandora alarm clock.
Once you hit the snooze button, an animation will be laser projected onto the ceiling above your bed. After drifting off to sleep, you’ll be awakened once again with a bunch of different sounds. When you open your eyes and look up at the ceiling, you’ll see a series of animations which reflect what you should actually be doing as part of your morning routine, instead of sleeping in. And if you keep hitting the snooze button, the animations will eventually reflect the catastrophic consequences if you don’t get out of bed. While I understand the device is designed to ‘guilt’ you out of bed in the morning, it would take a lot more than an animated catastrophe to get me up.
Any kind of recycling that involves toilets is kind of a hard sell, but who really cares where the water that’s used for flushing comes from? That’s why Sevin Coskun created the WashUP concept that stacks a washing machine on top of your toilet. After the washing cycle is over, the water that’s used to clean your clothes is stored in a reservoir where it can be used again later to flush the toilet.
As an added bonus the washing machine is situated higher off the ground, making it easier to load and unload clothing without having to crouch down. It also has the advantage of allowing people who live in smaller apartments to actually have room for a washing machine, since the space used by the toilet and washer overlap. And of course there’s all the hilarious ’soiled clothing’ jokes that I won’t even get into.
The difference between these renderings and every other iPhone 2.0 photochop is that these are based on a patent filled by Apple for a “dual sided trackpad.” What is a “dual sided trackpad” and why do some people think it might be included in the next (or some future) incarnation of the iPhone? Well, take a look at the actual patent:
So, in addition to a touch sensitive surface on the phone, the transparent clamshell flip-out screen is also a touch sensitive surface, on both sides. That gives the user three touchpads to play around with, depending on what the phone is being used for. The clamshell design allows the entire phone to be shrunk without sacrificing any functionality, although you will loose some screen space. Perfect for an iPhone Nano, perhaps? Your guess is as good as mine, but whatever this technology ends up it, it’s probably going to be something cool, and we may see it fairly soon, as the patent was filed in September of 2006, while the patent for the original iPhone was filed only four months earlier. ‘Course, that may not mean anything, but feel free to get excited anyway.
How many of you are married out there? How many of you proposed (or were proposed to) with a ring that could be plugged into your computer? I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that none of you are raising your hands right now. I’ll also advise that any of you thinking about popping the question should seer away from this USB Engagement Ring.
My wife is a pretty geeky girl, however, I can guarantee she’d have laughed in my face if I’d brought this in a box. She loves her tech just as much as the next girl, but she says that this one crosses a line. Sure, it’s novel that these two rings (yes, there’s one for the guy) fit together and can transfer data, but I don’t anyone that would actually wear these as wedding rings.
These appear to only be concept pieces for an art show. Hopefully we won’t actually see these on the market anytime soon.
As cool as the Optimus keyboard is, it’s still just a keyboard, with fixed keys that sit there, looking pretty and waiting to be pressed. The Siftables prototype (not concept, prototype) takes all the best parts of the Optimus keyboard (namely, the programmable OLED keys) and frees them into their own individual units. Each Siftable unit also contains short range infrared communicators, a 3-axis accelerometer, Bluetooth radio, flash memory, an integrated processor, a lithium polymer battery, some haptic hardware, and what look to be USB expansion ports. All that stuff in each Siftable. As you can see from the video, such complexity (especially when it comes to motion sensing and proximity communication) enables all sorts of interactive options. The sky is pretty much the limit with these things, and designers David Merrill and Jeevan Kalanithi already have “a number of collaborations in progress with researchers in academia and industry.”
While this might look like a concept design for the next version of the Nintendo Wiimote, it’s actually a ’smart’ wand designed to replace the traditional long stick used by the visually impaired. Created by Jin Woo Han it uses a sensor on the front to detect nearby objects and provides feedback about how far away they are with varying levels of vibration.
And even though it’s not illustrated too well in the photos, the wand includes a tactile strip where you place your thumb that will actually indicate the position of objects around you. Both of these methods of feedback are considered much better than using audio cues which can be easily missed if the user happens to be walking where there’s too much background noise. Unfortunately the Tactile Wand is just a concept right now, and given the time needed to perfect the design and the thorough testing that will be required, we probably won’t see it hitting the market anytime soon.
The Optimus keyboard is pretty and all, but it’s awfully flat and keyboardy. The Zen Sandbox PC may be monochrome, but it uses some kind of conceptual “z-axis” electronic surface to create dynamically tactile 3D features that the user can manipulate.
The Zen is designed for the visually impaired, since it would be able to display braille, or a textured simulation of your computer desktop. You can also turn it into a piano, or a xylophone, or just about anything else you can imagine. At the moment, though, you’ll have to imagine the Zen too, because it and the technology that powers it are still just a concept.
If you didn’t know, Polaroid recently announced that they will no longer be producing the instant film that made the company a household name. However, someone has created a concept gadget that would keep it alive forever.
This may look like an unusually thick Polaroid, which is exactly how it is meant to look. However, it is a digital picture frame with a small whiteboard underneath. It would have a built-in stand in the back and a memory card reader in the bottom for loading pics. If this were priced reasonably enough, I think it could sell well, if only for nostalgic reasons.
This very cool bookshelf concept designed by Arianna Vivenzio is basically a large elastic bandage stretched around 2 metal posts that are permanently fixed to the wall. The tension from the elastic allows you to fit a variety of different sized objects inside like books, CDs, DVDs and even boxes full of smaller items. However I think the elastic material would have to be particularly strong to ensure the bookshelf wouldn’t just sag to the ground, which in turn means there’s going to be a lot of force on those 2 metal posts. On the plus side if this thing ever snapped you wouldn’t have to worry about it putting an eye out since it would probably take your head clean off.
Related Tags: alarm-clock, Concepts
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